Hi all, I'm planning to do a new web app, and I'm weighing up several presentation frameworks.
I've always used JSP, but I'd like to know other alternatives.
Looking for frameworks I've found these ones: JSP, JSF, Tiles, SiteMesh.
Are there any more? (I suppose yes :), which would you choose?
> Hi all, I'm planning to do a new web app, and I'm weighing up several presentation frameworks.
> I've always used JSP, but I'd like to know other alternatives.
> Looking for frameworks I've found these ones: JSP, JSF, Tiles, SiteMesh.
> Are there any more? (I suppose yes :), which would you choose?
You are confusing several concepts. No two of the four "options" you
provided even do remotely the same thing. You could conceivable use all
four in the same project, actually. JSP is a presentation layer
technology. JSF is an application framework, and is generally used on
top of JSP. Tiles is a way of doing more re-usable layout with JSP;
while it's a bit tricky to use with JSF, it is quite possible and the
technique is described in David Geary's JSF book as well as encoded
reusably in the "Struts-Shale" project. SiteMesh is about integrating
several other web applications into one with a consistent look and feel,
and could be used to access the data from your web application.
Of course there are other alternatives... but until you you clarify what
you're actually looking for, I'm not sure what you want alternatives to.
Alternatives to JSP might include Velocity or XML/XSLT. Alternatives to
JSF include Tapestry, Struts (Classic), etc. Alternatives to Tiles
don't generally exist, but the problem space is fairly trivial. I'm not
aware of alternatives that do exactly the same thing as SiteMesh, but
the whole portlet concept is similar.

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